Archive for Cookery

03 Apr 2009
Cookery • Desserts • locavore log • Recipes

Butter Cookies From Brittany

That’s “Brittany” as in “French Brittany” the westernmost maritime province of France.

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Following my recent post on making Petits Pots de Yogurt With Strawberry Compote, Paula and Mary both asked about the golden cookie pictured next to the yogurt, and would I please provide the recipe?

Glad you ask.

The cookie is called Galette Bretonne in French and is a very simple cookie, totally unsophisticated: a real country cookie, really, with only a few ingredients and a pure butter taste (Butter from Brittany is renowned throughout France, and so are confections made with it). It’s similar to a short-bread cookie. Need I say, get the best butter possible? There, I said it.

You may use any cookie cutter shape you wish, but the traditional shape is round: I just use a small water glass to cut out the cookies. If you roll out the dough thinly, you’ll have lots of cookies; if you roll it out thick, you’ll have a lot less (but they’ll be very fat). Sometimes, I make thin cookies, sometimes I bake fat cookies. Depends on the mood. You just need to cook the thick cookies a little longer. I can make 4 dozen thin 2 1/4 ” (6 cm) cookies out of one batch or 2 dozen medium-thick cookies or 1 dozen thick cookies. Your choice…

The dry ingredients are measured by weight, not volume, as is typical of a French recipe and in grams. I won’t convert in ounces, because some of you – despite exhortations to the contrary – will read that as fluid oz and use cups. Also the recipe is easy to memorize in grams. Yep, time for you to get a scale! They are not that expensive and they come in really really handy – especially if you start baking for real. The liquid ingredients are measured by volume.

Butter Cookies From Brittany/ Petites Galettes Bretonnes Read more

sylvie | 3 comments | Tags: , ,
30 Mar 2009
Cookery • Dairy recipe • Desserts • Fruit recipe • locavore log

Petits Pots Of Yogurt And Strawberry Compote

Yogurt is for dessert too.

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After a 15+ year hiatus, I am again making yogurt. Easy, tasty, low-tech. Did I say easy? Since I much prefer eating yogurt to drinking milk, I have been making at least two quarts of yogurt a week. Love it! As was explained here: heat the milk (if the milk is pasteurized, I only heat up to 120 F; but I do heat up to 180F when using raw milk). Add milk to a large mason jar with a couple of tablespoons of plain yogurt, shake the jar. Put it in a small cooler overnight with a mason jar full of very hot water. Go to bed. Voila: yogurt for breakfast. I love it.

You can make it in big jars, in small jars, in tiny jars… For all of us who are compulsive jar saver, now there IS an excuse to save to save more jars…

I even bought some “Swiss-style” yogurt. It listed 4 kinds of active cultures (Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, and L. bifidus and I can’t remember the 4th – how geeky, is that?). It turned out to be less tart than the other yogurt I was getting. I am now keeping an eye out for Bulgur-style yogurt, which I remember as really really creamy and which I think contains – what else? - L. bulcaricus. I tried to add a little cream or half and half to my yogurt, and while it made it richer it still was not that wonderful Bulgarian yogurt (maybe it exists only in my memory?). I guess next time I am at a WholeFood or Natural Store, I’ll have to investigate the yogurt case. So here I am: collecting pretty china tea cups, AND yogurt cultures … See what life in the country can do to a (fairly) level-headed girl?

But then it hit me – I mean about getting creamy yogurt: strain it! It’ll give me a Greek-style yogurt. It worked! Delicious indeed (although not Bulgarian).

More importanly it was a pretty good success at a recent picnic I put together. I used Tristar strawberries, picked in the garden last summer and frozen, with a little sugar and vanilla bean to make my fruit base, combine it with yogurt in small canning jars. And man, I thought I made good ice-cream, but based on the reactions, I obviously need to be making even more yogurt. So any way, here is the recipe for Greek-Style Yogurt with Vanilla Bean & ‘Tristar’ Strawberry Compote – as much as this is a recipe! Read more

sylvie | 18 comments | Tags: , ,
29 Mar 2009
Cookery

The Art of Picnicing

Serve good food. Serve fresh food.

Use real silverware and a real cloth napkin. Make it pretty.

Be imaginative in your use of containers – avoid plastic.

Print a menu and tuck it in the box.

Have fun.

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags:
15 Mar 2009
Cookery • locavore log • Main Dish • Meat/poultry Recipe • Vegetable recipe

He Likes Duck Fat

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Potatoes fried in duck fat, with garlic & parsley, a very fresh green salad (with not a leaf of lettuce in sight) topped with a little bit of duck breast – a perfect lunch for this blessedly rainy Sunday.

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Obviously, he thought so too (and had an intense lemon tart with coffee for dessert).

This meal is characteristic of improvised cooking; you know, cooking without a recipe based on what you’ve got. We had a breast of duck left from a roast and duck fat just rendered from that same roast, and potatoes, of course. That calls for potatoes in duck fat, reminiscent of Pommes de Terre à la Sarladaise, a dish named after the town of Sarlat in Southwest France. While one variations on this homey dish includes truffles, the poor woman’s version (mine) makes do with garlic. Don’t knock it off until you’ve tried it: duck fat makes the best fried potatoes. As far as the green salad, it was a mix of mache, sorrel, baby red Russian kale & Tuscan kale, and frisée endive, fresh from the garden. Any good-quality store bought mesclun will do; make sure it’s on the robust side so it can take the hot dressing, and with a hint of bitterness or tartness to stand up to the richness of the potatoes.

End of Winter Salad with Duck Breast & Potatoes in Duck Fat Read more

sylvie | 15 comments | Tags: , , , , , ,
11 Mar 2009
Cookery • Dairy recipe • locavore log • Snack

Making Yogurt

It only took me 15 years.

I used to make yogurt. Really, I did. I had one of those nifty little machine with individual glass containers. You prepared your yogurt mix, pour it into the little glass jars, nested the jars into matching holes in the machine, set the cover, turn it on, went to bed…. and voila yogurt for breakfast.

Then we moved, and somehow the jars and the machines got separated. I could never find the jars again. And as good yogurt started to be available in the better stores, the urgency of making yogurt faded. So a few years ago, before we moved again (to our current place) I got rid of the yogurt machine. Of course, a few months later, I found the jars which had been packed more than 10 years prior with Mason jars – a box which had remained untouched as I did not do that much canning in the city. Unlike now.

Also, although I can find respectable yogurt nowadays, the supply is more limited and I have to drive a bit to get it. So I have been vaguely thinking about a yogurt machine again. Except I did not want yet another one-purpose-only gadget. I have heard also of swaddling your yogurt in blanket to keep it warm. That held no appeal to me.

Fast forward a few days, when I read that post. Duh!!!! a cooler and a jar filled with hot water. Who needs a yogurt machine? blankets? Pfff!

That morning, I made yogurt. I loved the uncomplicated low tech approach. I probably put in 1/2 cup of yogurt instead of the 1/3 that El calls for in her recipe since I preferred to err of the side of firm yogurt (the recipe is in the comment section of the post – be sure to scroll down El’s post). That night, for dessert, we had yogurt with roasted Italian plums (frozen from last summer’s harvest).

All I need from now on is a few tablespoons of my yogurt and some milk. It’s little sourdough bread – just keep it going.

I am sold! I have become a yogurt maker again.

It’s about time.

Thanks, El.

sylvie | 10 comments | Tags: , ,
22 Feb 2009
Appetizer • Cookery • Garden • herb • herb recipe • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • Side Dish • Soups • vegetable • Vegetable recipe

Lovely Lemony Sorrel

There are indubitable signs of springs out there (besides the 2 minutes of additional daily daytime we are getting now).

For once, the snowdrops are nodding their tiny white bells in the still blustery gusts of wind and then, then!, yellow IS swelling the buds of the early daffodils. But for the ever hopeful kitchen gardener, a much surer sign that spring is coming is what’s budding, swelling, germinating, pushing up or otherwise showing signs of life in the vegetable garden.

Is there something fresh I can sink my teeth in – or at least wake up my taste buds (pun intended) with? Something green? With a little bite? Something… live? I have talked about reliable mache growing outside in winter, but a few other denizens that grow happily enough in a cold frame provide fresh taste at this time of the year: spinach, cutting celery, parsley, arugula, and sorrel are among them. They do not need a cold frame per se, but the protection provided by a cold frame allows them to send forth new leaves much earlier than their unprotected brethren, left totally outside in what is otherwise a generally bleak landscape at this time of the year.

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Sorrel might be less well known on the list, so let’s talk about it, a little, shall we? Read more

sylvie | 23 comments | Tags: , , , , , , ,
20 Feb 2009
Cookery • Kitchen Garden

Upcoming Workshops

OK! commercial plug for … me!

Those in the Washington DC area, Charlottesville area and in the Piedmont, who are interested in cooking or kitchen gardening may be want to take a look at my upcoming cookery and kitchen garden workshops in Washington, VA in Rappahannock County. Also listed on my web site here and here. Attendance (especially in the cookery workshops is limited, so register early if you are interested.)

  • Gardening Workshop: Start Your Own Vegetable & Fruit Transplants from Seeds.

Offered on Saturday February 28, 2009, 2:00 to 4:30 and again (same class) on Wednesday March 11, 2009, 1:00 to 3:30 PM.
Learn when and how to start specific seeds indoor in flats and pots for later transplanting and which ones are better direct-seeded. We will review sowing calendar for various plants (vegetable, fruit, herbs and even some edible flowers), appropriate soil(s) to use, germination conditions, light requirement, care after seedlings emerge, how to harden seedlings off, good transplanting techniques, fertilization practices, pest and disease control. Participant will choose seeds from the instructors’ collection to start up to two flats. They will take their flats home to tend and transplant at the appropriate time. Handouts will be distributed. All supplies (flats, pots, seeds, soil) provided. Bring your own apron & gloves! $45 person / $75 for 2 people sharing trays.

  • Cookery Workshop: Provence in Rappahannock/ Saturday March 14, 2009, 10:00 AM to 2:30 PM.

Learn to prepare a festive Provencal style Sunday lunch (a meal suitable for dinner too, of course!) using ingredients readily available in late winter: Cream of Leek and Potato Soup; Roasted Duck with Olives; a Provencal Vegetable Gratin; Winter Mesclun Salad; Fresh Lemon Tart. Then sit-down to enjoy lunch of the just-prepared dishes. Printed recipes provided. $75/ person Read more

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , , ,
14 Feb 2009
Cookery • locavore log • Recipes • Soups • Vegetable recipe

Cream Those Sunchokes

So what do you do with that almost, but not quite forgotten vegetable, Jerusalem Artichokes or Sunchokes, freshly dug from the garden?

I have read that you can eat it raw, but have not tried that yet – except for a sliver to taste: it’s crunchy and mildly sweet , like a good young turnip, not as crunchy as a a water chestnut, and with a taste of its own, vaguely nutty. El mentioned that she has eaten it in a gratin (and although she likes it, it does not like her), Colleen turns it into a creamy sunchocke soup, and Hank pickles it to avoid the noisy side effects (See Note) that sunchokes have on some people. While the pickle recipe looks tempting, reminding me of the Indian-style pickles “Zachards” that I was eating when growing up, it takes more time to make than the soup (especially as you must let it age two weeks). So soup it was I made. Many sources suggest sunchokes be used like potatoes, so I decided to adapt my leek & potato soup to become Leek and Sunchoke Soup.

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Read more

sylvie | 13 comments | Tags: , , ,
12 Feb 2009
Cookery • locavore log • Main Dish

Presto Garden Buckwheat Noodles

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I don’t know about you, but when I am home working and need a quick lunch, I want it QUICK. It’s often throwing together a green salad & omelet, or fajitas (or quesadillas), or – in winter – reheating some soup and making a sandwich (tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich being a favorite). Sometime, I want a little more, though, and that’s when stir-fry come to the rescue. Like today.

All one need is some noodles, a couple of veggies to keep the taste simple, some seasoning, and a little protein – today, it was eggs. At other time, left over meat or chicken works just fine.

So I put a big pot of water to boil. Run to the the garden to see what I can get and settle on some baby kale and tatsoi (raiding the fridge will do, in a pinch); I’ve got plenty of shallots, garlic and ginger on hand (I know, it amazes you that I keep ginger on hand); soy sauce? here. Sesame oil? check. Looks like we are leaning towards “Asian” flavors here, so let’s use some buckwheat noodles… yes? yes! Let’s go. Stir-fry eggs, then the veggies as the pasta cooks, add pasta, add seasoning. Serve. Eat.

Oh, and do note, that this is very flexible. Adjust the quantities to fit your needs and appetite. I only provide quantities for those people who can’t do without. You know who you are. Ah, yes, I need to call this something too, right? How about Presto Garden Buckwheat Noodles? I am hungry, so that’s good enough. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: , , , , ,
06 Feb 2009
Cookery

Secret Ingredient

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That’s my little dirty secret. Dirty, because, you know, it’s not local. Shhh … don’t tell anybody. (I drink coffee too)

Use immoderately: in tomato sauce (of puttanesca inspiration); mashed in salad dressing (beyond Caesar) – really good with steamed baby leeks; cooked with Swiss chard or spinach until it has melted in; pounded with nuts, garlic & cream and tossed with pasta; with garlic, lots of it, olive oil and pasta; in tapenade – bien sur! nothing secret there, isn’t it?; to boost the flavor of a meat stew; on pizza; with caramelized onions; in mayonnaise spread… PriceClub used to carry big glass jar full of them little fishies, but Costco does not: I have to buy them in little tins. Which I do. In quantity. Keeps forever, right? except, they don’t last that long.

And fish sauce which is often made from fermented “it” anyway. For stir-fries, and rice-based soups,

What’s your secret ingredient?

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags: ,
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